Enzyme Lab Essay

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Enzymes
Abstract
Lactase is an enzyme found in the small intestine that breaks down lactoase into the products galactose and glucose. Lactase can be purchased in many forms and one form is the pill form in which people take when they are lactose intolerant. These people lack the enzyme lactase, and cannot break down the sugar lactose into its component parts.
Lactose, the sugar found in milk, is a disaccharide composed of glucose and galactose. Sucrose will be also used in the labs. Sucrose is a normal table sugar and is also a disaccharide composed of fructose and glucose. Although lactose is similar to sucrose, the enzyme lactase will only break down only it’s substrate, lactose, because of the shape of the sugar.

Objectives/ Introduction
Enzymes are protein molecules that speed up a chemical reaction. Enzymes are specific; they only work with certain substrates. Substrates are the reactants in an enzymatic reaction. Out group conducted two labs which examine how specific an enzyme is to a substrate and how much environmental factors affect enzyme reactions. Lactase is the enzyme that breaks down lactose into galactose and glucose. Since they’re both a six sided sugar, lactase can only break down lactose. Lactose is the sugar found in milk, and sucrose is an ordinary table sugar. Sucrose is a disaccharide composed of glucose and fructose. Fructose is a five sided sugar, so lactase cannot break down sucrose. Temperature and pH are two environmental factors that will be used in the second part of the lab. One of the enzymes is denatured, meaning it was boiled for twenty minutes in hot water.
The purpose of this experiment is to examine the specificity of the enzyme lactase to specific substrate lactose. Our group predicted that if lactase breaks down lactose then glucose and another sugar will be the end result for the first part. For the second part we predicted that if the pH is 4 then the lactase will be getting a larger amount of glucose and if...